by Laurel Doud
“He's a nice dog” was the only thing she could think to say.
Philip agreed, quickly dismissing her.
But they ended up walking in the same direction. Katharine lagged behind, so he wouldn't have to feel like he had to escort her, but Sid trotted by her side, forcing Philip to drop back and join them. He told her that he and his friends were trying to forget what was going to happen that night — the draft lottery. He had tried to get a deferment, a medical discharge, but nothing worked. His birth date was in the glass jug, and his balls were on the chopping block.
That night she waited and listened to the dates being drawn. March 9, Philip's birthday, was called at number 317; he would not be drafted. The next day she baked chocolate chip cookies and, marveling at her courage, took them to him in congratulations. She woke him up. He and his friends had gotten totally blotto — in celebration of good numbers, in denial of bad ones — after the draw. She sat on the edge of his bed while he tried to focus. He ate a couple of cookies and rebounded, telling her that cookies were a great cure for hangovers. They sat on his bed all that day talking — about the war, the meaning of life, the future of mankind — and in the early evening, she utterly amazed herself by crawling under the covers with him.
Then he said, That was the best cure for a hangover.
For a long time afterward, whenever he woke up with a hangover, she baked him chocolate chip cookies.
She hadn't baked him chocolate chip cookies in years.
No, I can't think about that now. It was best that she go to sleep, and with the dawning of a new day, she would awake feeling fine. She would attack the bedroom and find out exactly what day it was. It was a Plan.
She woke up, clutching her stomach as it spasmed. She tried to pull herself protectively into the fetal position, but both calves cramped and jerked her legs into a full extension. She quickly flexed her heels to ease the cramps. When there was a lull in the pain, Katharine realized it was long past dawn. And I feel like shit. So much for the Plan.
She lay in bed and wanted to stay there, but she was cold. She had sweat through her clothes, the bedsheets were damp, and she stank like some sort of feral animal.
She ached for the smell of coffee; Philip was always up before the rest of the family to start a pot and read the sports page in peace and quiet. The light of day was all wrong here too, coming from the left through Thisby's bedroom window instead of like at home, slowly approaching the foot of the bed, only to slant off down the hallway before reaching the covers. She looked away.
The sun was streaming onto the kitchen table from the balcony glass door. She was sure it was already terribly smoggy outside, but the heat felt good. She thought fleetingly that she might go outside on the balcony but was afraid of the smell from the bedspread. She couldn't tell what the balcony looked down on, but across the way was another apartment complex, five stories high, with balconies jutting out like the ends of Lincoln Logs.
She pulled out an Eggo waffle from the freezer, but after heating it, she eyed it warily. She couldn't trust this body. What seemed like hunger might not be real hunger, and this body was liable to take retribution. She carefully ate the waffle over the kitchen sink and waited, feeling the sun rays penetrate and ease her stiffness. Her stomach seemed to accept the food with only a mild aftershock of queasiness, so she tempted fate and took some aspirin.
Back in the bedroom, she checked out the telephone's answering machine. There were four messages. She pressed the GREETING button first and listened to a surly version of the voice that Katharine was able to produce from this body.
“Talk to me,” the message said. There was a long pause and then a click.
Katharine felt her blood heat. God, she sounds just like Ben.
She pressed the PLAY MESSAGES button and a male voice slurred sluggishly, “Hey, this is Marko. You know, David's friend? You know, we met … where the fuck were we? Oh yeah, at the rave down in Pasadena. I think. It was a couple of months ago. Around there, I guess. I hang with Laddie and Greg. Anyway, I was thinking about you. Call me, you know, if you want to. My number is …”
Katharine couldn't imagine ever calling this lost boy, but she wrote down his name, phone number, and his friends' names on her brown paper.
The last three calls were from the same person, a man whose voice was intimate yet demanding. “I need to talk to you. Call me.”
“I told you to call me. You said you were going to call in for messages. What, no phones down there? Call me.”
“I'll be out of town for a day or two. Leave me a message where I can reach you.”
He sounded as if he had a claim on Thisby, and Katharine hugged herself protectively. But he said he was going out of town for a while. She had some time. She erased the messages.
No more excuses. It's time to tackle the mess in this room.
Katharine sat at the kitchen table surrounded by the loot she had brought in from the bedroom. The watch she now twirled on Thisby's wrist was deceptively simple, gold with a thin expansion bracelet. The word “Cartier” was elegantly scripted across the face. She had found it on the floor under a pile of clothes she'd sorted through, hanging up the decent-looking ones and throwing the obviously dirty clothes in a corner for washing later. The style of most of the clothing was too weird and trendy. Many were in colors Katharine never more. They had names in mail-order catalogs like coffee bean, mint julep, and hydrangea, though Thisby's favorite seemed to be varying shades of the color purple. There was a great deal of black clothing, though, that Katharine wouldn't mind wearing. She had often worn black herself. She had read that it made a body look ten pounds thinner.
Katharine found a pair of hiphugger, bell-bottom Levis and a halter top made from a pair of cut-up denim jeans wadded together under the dresser. These were original relics from Katharine's own teenage years. As she shook out the clothes, the smell of musk oil escaped from the creases. The scent dazed and then slightly confused her until the image of herself in 1970 materialized in her brain. She was dressed in similar garb, perfumed in musk oil, and planted in front of one of the last picture shows that featured a concave screen that stretched from one side of the theater to the other, surrounded by the sights and sounds of Woodstock — Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, confessing to a half a million people, “This is our second gig. This is the second time we've ever played in front of people, man. We're scared shitless.” Katharine had watched paisley-clad young people cavort on the ground and in the ponds, making love, drinking, smoking, dancing. She had watched Sly Stone admonish the crowd for waiting for the approval of their neighbors to let it all hang down and then work them into a sea of arms raised in salute, ironically reminiscent of World War II footage Katharine had seen of Hitler's political rallies. She had watched in sexual excitement as bare-chested Roger Daltrey of The Who pleaded with the audience to see him, feel him, touch him, heal him. She saw Woodstock five times the summer of 1970.
She put the clothes in a closet to be given away to the Goodwill.
Small pieces of paper — matchbooks, torn corners of menus, crispy napkins with the outline of once-wet bar glasses in their centers — were laid out like a solitaire hand on the kitchen table. Written on them were phone numbers. Katharine had found them in the drawer of one of Thisby's night tables. She had also found a set of keys and a checkbook. There was no ending balance listed in the account ledger, and the checks were so haphazardly recorded and out of sequence that nothing could be inferred. The keys had no identifying marks — no automobile insignia, no company logos. It was as if Thisby had lost every original key and had to replace them with generic ones.
The address book she had found at the bottom of a night table drawer was obviously old but well used, the cardboard showing through the cracked and broken pink vinyl. It was a time line of Thisby's life, the handwriting illustrating the evolution from child to young adult.
The first entry, under B, was written in block printing:
&nbs
p; ANNE & ROBERT BENNET
1125 HILLCREST HEIGHTS
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA 90210
555-1230
Then, in progressively maturing styles, were phone numbers for “Mom's work,” “Dad's work.”
Underneath all of that was “Rob,” first with a dorm address at UCLA, then one for the SAE fraternity house, then listings for a couple of apartments. The last entry was just a phone number, written with a heavily pressed hand.
There were other Bennets listed, including a “Kewpie” with a local number and an Uncle Roy with an address in Central America, but no one with a name beginning with Q.
Or is “Q” also Kewpie?
In the desk, Katharine had found white lined paper and was now writing out names and their possible relationships to Thisby. At least I know the names of Thisby's parents, and I assume there is an older brother named Rob who graduated from UCLA some years back.
It was early evening, and she was stiff and sore. She had forgotten the pain in her head for a while, but now became acutely aware of it again. The list she had made wasn't as long as she thought it would be. There were almost more names of bars she compiled from the cocktail napkins and matchbooks — Goodbars, The Rapture, TechNoir, Potters, and F/X — than of friends who weren't crossed off and out of Thisby's life. Katharine vowed never to set foot in any of the bars. And the friends? Well, I certainly can do without them too. She folded the list and put it in her back pocket. This is your life, Thisby Flute, reduced to names on wide-ruled school paper. Pretty pathetic, isn't it?
That's when the phone rang.
It rang virtually in her left ear, and she was discombobulated until she realized that the drapes flanking the sliding glass door obscured a telephone.
She waited four rings — I'm not ready — but the answering machine didn't pick up. She began to shake, and as the ringing went on, each sound jolted her as if she were being given electroshock treatment.
She grabbed the receiver even as her brain screamed, I'm not ready! “Hello?” she demanded.
There was a silence, then a voice, sounding disgusted and hostile. “So you are there. What happened? Police run you out?”
“No” was all she could think of to say. Run out of where?
There was another pause. “Or didn't you go? I saw one of your so-called friends, and he said he thought you might be gone for a couple of weeks.”
If TB had really died, no one would have come over to find her for weeks. And what a gruesome find. Poor thing. “I didn't go. I've been pretty sick.”
“Yeah, I'll bet.” There was the sound of inhaled breath. “Someday you're going to kill yourself, you know. What you do to yourself is your own business. I don't care. But when what you do affects Mom and Dad, then it's my business. And Quince's got it in her head that you're some sort of cult figure. Like Sid and Nancy.”
So. This is brother Rob and … Quincey? … is the little sister; obviously the “Q” in the letter. So Thisby's the bad influence? What a surprise.
She began to feel a bit more confident. If she wanted to get back to her family, she had to stay sane and convince others she was sane too. I'll cleanse this body. Cold turkey. I'm not mentally addicted. She was going to have to try and play the part of Thisby Flute Bennet on the smallest of clues. I'm a quick study. Maybe she could pull this off. At least he thinks I'm his sister. “I got real close this time to killing myself.” She waited a moment and then continued, “But things have changed. I'm different.” How different, hopefully, you'll never know.
“Yeah, right.”
“But I've drawn a blank on some parts of my life.” Like a total blank.
“Well, no doubt you've killed off whole sections of your brain, so it doesn't surprise me.”
Like the whole casaba. “Well, it really scared me this time. I'm different. I'm clean.”
“I've heard that before,” he said, but Katharine could hear the faintest hint of hope in his sarcasm. “Let's see if you can stay clean through the weekend. It was Mom and Dad's anniversary last week — you know, Midsummer Night and all, not that I expected you to remember that — but they asked me to see if I couldn't get you to come over Saturday to celebrate a little late. They're also hoping you'll spend the night.”
Katharine drew a breath and steadied herself. “Okay.”
“Okay? Okay? Like hell, okay. I'll believe it when I see it.”
Katharine felt her temper rise. She didn't care what the history was between this girl and her brother, he didn't need to be so rude. “I said I'd be there. In fact, why don't you come over and pick me up?”
There was another pause. “What do you want?”
Katharine was beginning to get exasperated. “A ride.”
“Hock your Porsche?”
Porsche? Geezus, how'd she afford that? “No. I just want a ride.” The thought of trying to find her way around LA, the labyrinth of freeways, made her sweat. Harbor, San Diego, Long Beach, Hollywood, Artesia … I'll take a wrong turn, or get forced into a detour, and end up in a really bad area and maybe even get attacked by thugs.
“You be ready at one o'clock. And I mean one o'clock. If you're not, you can find your own way there. Hey,” he added, as if he were speaking as he was thinking, “you still got your driver's license, don't you?”
“Of course I do.” Did she? She hadn't checked to see if the license was valid.
“Is the Porsche all right? You didn't wreck it, did you?”
Katharine was beginning to ripple. I take it all back. This isn't going to be easy. “Listen, Rob, I'll be ready at one —”
“Rob?” he barked.
Oh, hell, what have I said now?
“What do you really want?” he demanded.
Katharine felt exhausted. She could hardly answer. “I'll be ready at one. Bye.”
She hung up the phone and dissolved into tears. Her head hurt. Her eyes hurt. The muscles across her chest and shoulders hurt. These aren't even my pains. I didn't do anything to deserve this. I want to go home. I can't handle this. They'll probably put me away. Maybe I am insane. But I want to go home. I want to see my family.
She stopped crying, too depleted to continue. She would go home. She would find this Porsche of TB's and drive home. She'd somehow make them realize who she was. She knew things about them only she could know. They would have to believe her. So their mother returns after being dead a year, in the body of a twenty-two-year-old drug addict from LA. It was weird, of course. But they couldn't deny who she was. Her kids would have a young-looking mother. Her husband would have an old wife in a new body. Maybe cleaned up, this body wouldn't be so bad. He might even like it. Going home. It sounded so soothing. But something kept tweaking her. That woman. That woman on the phone. Who is she?
She picked up the phone again and dialed home. That woman answered. She was laughing.
“Is Mrs. Ashley home?” Katharine asked almost belligerently.
The woman laughed again, her mouth not quite on the receiver. “Stop that.” There was a muffled chuckle. “I'm sorry,” she said into the mouthpiece. “This is Mrs. Ashley.”
“Mrs. Katharine Ashley?” Katharine was getting mad. It kept the panic at bay.
“No. This is Diana Ashley,” and her voice took on a more formal tone. “I'm sorry, Katharine died a year ago.”
Oh, God. It's true. I'm dead and gone, and he's remarried. Why did they let me live if they planned on taking my life away?
“Would you like to speak with my husband? He's right here.” Katharine heard Philip chuckle again. The woman's voice spun away from the receiver. “Hon, it's someone asking for Katharine.”
“No,” Katharine gasped. “No,” she repeated and hung up. My husband. My husband. She felt her heart shrivel — two sizes too small — then picked up the phone again and dialed 411.
“What city, please,” said the voice.
“I need to know the date and the day of the week.”
“June twenty-seventh. Tuesday,” the
voice said without hesitation.
What a city, LA. No one bats an eye.
Katharine put the receiver down with measured control. She had three and a half days to prepare to meet her new family.
Act 1, Scene 4
“A lot of people enjoy being dead.”
“But they're not dead really. They're just backing away from life.”
—BUD CORT AND RUTH GORDON, Harold and Maude (1971)
Katharine ran on white rage. She was a dilithium crystal, glowing hardcold with righteous anger and jealousy. A halo of betrayal surrounded her, and she felt as though she could blind people with her incandescence. He couldn't even wait a year to get married.
She found and stalked the laundry room — just let anyone confront me as Thisby. I'll blow right through them — but apparently TB had not been the friendliest person in the complex. People said hello, but they did not start up any conversations.
Well, that's just fine with me.
By Thursday morning, she decided it was time to go out into the big city. She walked along the outskirts of UCLA and at Westwood Boulevard turned away from the school and headed into the business section decorated in the blue, white, and red of the upcoming Independence Day. The shops were small, mostly record and clothing stores catering to students, fastfood restaurants, bars, bakeries. She propelled herself away from the smell of the doughnuts, bought a bagel in a delicatessen, and picked at it while she continued down the street.
She went through the sidewalk bins of pulp fiction and used textbooks at Prospero's Books and bought a street map of LA and a dog-eared Sunset Western Garden Book, which armed her with a small measure of self.
She stopped in front of a small beauty salon called, simply, Hair. She was worried about spending all the money in Thisby's wallet, but the reflection in the glass was more than she could stand. She looked drawn and unhealthy, and she didn't know what to do about Thisby's hair. She had tried to comb it flat, but it just ended up looking like some sort of nonregulation pith helmet.